Those of us whose jobs keep us inside buildings might be concerned about climate change, but it’s nothing compared to folks whose livelihoods depend on what happens outdoors.
“We lost half of our carrots because they rotted in the ground, completely saturated for two months straight. … Everything came in weeks later than normal. We were spending twice as much time to harvest half as many vegetables,” said Abigail Clarke of Winter Street Farm in Claremont, looking back at last year’s far-too-wet spring followed by a far-too-dry summer and fall.
That sort of “weather whiplash” is becoming more common as we heat up the globe, changing annual patterns of wind, precipitation, cloud cover, evaporation and humidity in unexpected ways. Farming has always been something of a hit-or-miss profession, but as a result of this whiplash, the hits are getting harder to find. Those of us who eat food — which, presumably, is most of us — should take note.
What should farmers do? Clarke is one of the panelists who will be speaking on that topic at the annual meeting of Northeast Organic Farming Association’s winter conference on Saturday, Feb. 8, at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. For details, see nofanh.org/nofawinterconference.
Despite these problems, Clarke said Winter Street Farm coped fairly well with 2024’s whiplash mostly due to one thing: “Diversity is the key word for climate resilience.”
Winter Street Farm is small, focusing on roughly two acres of vegetables, but during the course of the year it grows “30 different types of crops” with rotation to keep the beds producing.
“If we were doing 50 acres of just potatoes or just something else, that tends to be impacted more heavily by the climate factors — too little rain, too much rain, too cold, too hot, weather fluctuations,” she said. “We usually assume that one or two of them aren’t going to go well … so we depend on others. Maybe it’s a year with a drought and we get really good melons.”
Diversity is more than just the number of crops, she said. Increasing pollinator habitat helps plants flourish, maintaining wetlands makes it easier to deal with flooding and community composting helps keep nutrients in the ground.
Another major factor Clarke cited is no-till agriculture, avoiding the traditional farming practice of turning over the soil before planting. Tilling has big benefits, but over time, it can lead to topsoil loss, forcing the use of more fertilizer and soil amendments, a financial and environmental burden.
The five-year-old Winter Street Farm is typical of recent trends in New Hampshire agriculture and of NOFA members in particular. It’s small, locally owned and depends on direct-to-consumer sales of multiple crops, much of it via a CSA, rather than single-crop sales to a wholesaler. This model has drawbacks. For example, harvesting 30 different vegetables is a lot more labor intensive than running a combine through a cornfield. But in stony New Hampshire where land prices are high and well-off customers are more likely to pay a premium for local food, it is the best bet for many farmers.
There is an argument to be made that the small-is-beautiful organic approach is too limited to really matter in our struggles to meet the world’s growing appetite. Despite what “great replacement” folks say, the planet will have an extra billion mouths to feed during your lifetime. Of particular concern is that organic agriculture often requires more acres per calorie produced than does large-scale farming, putting more stress on wild lands. Proponents say any short-term difference is outweighed by organic agriculture’s long-term benefits to soil health.
To Clarke this shouldn’t be an either-or debate, because size and type of farms is another place where diversity helps. “There’s a place for large-scale and small-scale agriculture. Having all the scales in our food system is really important.”
Clarke says she and her partner Jonathan Hayden worked on traditional farms before starting Winter Street Farm. They saw the problems of that approach in a world where unexpected flooding is increasingly becoming a norm.
“The farms we were working at had heavy cultivation, a lot of bare soil. You have a big rain event and it just washes it away,” she said. “That first two inches (of topsoil) is really your resilience. If you lose it, well …”
This altered their approach. “We built climate change into our farm from the start,” she said. “We’re not 20 years in and trying to change systems that had been working but we suddenly had to change. That makes it easier.”
“We spent 100 years or so in the direction of fully mechanized farms on a larger and larger scale … What we’re getting now is farmers with worse and worse soil, producing less and less (per acre). We’d like to defy that,” she said.
And while food supplies need agricultural efficiency, Clark said “efficiency means to scale your operation, not necessarily just ‘bigger is better’.”
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